Welcome to Crucible

20/05/2020

Hello Essence hunters, and welcome to Crucible!

We’re incredibly excited to share the world of Cruciblewith you. Today is an amazing day for the team here at Relentless Studios: we’ve poured our hearts and souls into this game for many years and finally get to expand our world to include all of you. Crucible is the first PC game published by Amazon Games, and that responsibility and privilege is humbling for all of us. We’ll be running the full range of emotions today, from relief at getting to welcome everyone into Crucible, to frantic quadruple-checking to make sure we flipped all the right switches, to the sheer joy of getting to play the game alongside everyone and watch it be streamed live.

Crucible has been a wild journey for us. The game we’re proud to share with you today has shifted and evolved since the announcement many years ago of the original Amazon Games lineup. This pursuit of constant improvement to reach the game we’re releasing today speaks to why we’re proud of Relentless as a name for our studio. Years ago, when Jeff Bezos first envisioned Amazon, he wanted to call the company Relentless as way of saying the company would be relentless in its approach to customer satisfaction. That spirit and way of thinking defines the entire story of Crucible’s development and the future we envision for Crucible for many years to come.

We’re living in extraordinary circumstances right now. Our entire team is working from home as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 situation, which means we’re launching the game entirely remotely. This is certainly a first for me, and we’ve had to adjust virtually everything about the way we work as a team to make this possible. We’ve done all we can to prepare, but we’re learning in real-time what it means to launch a game as a remote team. This entire experience will be a fascinating experiment for all of us. They say that “nothing done easy makes a good story,” and we’re hoping that in the future, we’ll get to tell very cool stories about today and the road that led us here. We’re doing everything in our power to make sure that your experience as players is untouched by the logistics of shipping a brand-new game remotely.

Each of you is likely also experiencing a significant disruption in your routine and your life. We realize and appreciate that by playing Crucible you’re doing more than playing our game. You’re making an investment of that most valuable asset: your time. To make that investment worthwhile, Crucible needs to feel like it has a bright future, and that bright future requires our team to listen to and communicate with the community and—just as importantly—back up what we say by delivering. Like it did all through development, Crucible will evolve over time with your help as we strive to constantly improve the game. We’ll make mistakes along the way, but when we do we’ll own them and be candid about what we learned, and we’ll always work to bring you great new experiences based on those learnings.

Crucible’s Pre-Season runs from May 20 to July 13. Why “Pre-Season,” you ask? We’re keenly aware that the launch of an online game to the public comes with all sorts of learning experiences for everyone—players and developers alike. Because of that, we wanted to make sure to leave a window for players to learn, for things to break (and get fixed!), and to see how balance plays out in a live environment without the pressure of a competitive season raising the stakes for players. After the Pre-Season, we’ll roll right into Season 1, which will be all the better for everything we learned during our first 8 weeks!

As a special thank-you to everyone joining us for the beginning of this incredible journey, we’re offering a one-time gift of 1,000 Credits (a $10 USD value). Credits are Crucible’s in-game currency you can use to get the Pre-Season Battle Pass or anything else that catches your eye! You can log in any time between now and the end of June 1 to automatically receive this gift. Full details can be found here.

We’ll be back soon with more updates. In the meantime, you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Discord to get the latest news hot off the presses from our dev team. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on Twitch to see videos and streams as they're released.

We can’t wait to see you all in game, to watch you on stream, to see the content you create and how you evolve the world and characters of Crucible beyond our own wildest imaginations. Today is a day none of us on the Crucible team will ever forget, and we’re so thankful to get to share it with you!